Thursday, 14 May 2015

Communication Skills: Why Does It Go So Wrong?

Many
years ago we pinched a really good phrase from a BT initiative they ran back in
the 1990s:

Miscommunication is the
norm.

The
basis of this rather stark phrase is that communication goes wrong a lot –
perhaps even as much as it goes right.

And
why is that?

It’s
unlikely you’ll remember way back to your childhood (perhaps you will!), but
that’s when the foundations for how we communicate were laid.

Right
now, I have five year old twins in my life and it’s like being in a
communications laboratory watching how they learn to communicate.

Of
course, there are the magic words, please and thank you that are drummed in
whenever they need reminding. However,
there’s so much more that’s going into
their very plastic brains: how the
adults around them communicate, how they learn to resolve conflict, how they
deal with their competitiveness, how they are encouraged to express their
feelings and let the adults know what’s happening. I observe them learning to lie, to
exaggerate, to negotiate.

Teaching
children to communicate ‘well’ is a constant process, constant reminding,
constant reinforcing till, at some point, they will hopefully acquire healthy
communication skills. What also strikes
me is that good communication ‘should’ be a constant process for everyone; we
should be refreshing our skills often, gaining new insights and strengthening
our ability to manage challenging situations.

What’s
far more common is that we unconsciously learn how to communicate when we’re
young and that’s it; we carry those particular skills into adulthood even if
they aren’t always appropriate or healthy.

And
that’s why it goes wrong so much of the time – we often respond to situations
as if we were five (irrationally) or ten (‘it’s not fair”) or fifteen (stroppy
and stubborn) rather than as mature adults.

Communication
is a complex process of expressing a thought or feeling in such a way that
other people understand what you are trying to convey. Mostly, we communicate from our point of
view. The additional complexity is that other people will be hearing your
communication from their point of view. That’s all fine if your points of view are in sync.

Far
more often, points of view are different – from slightly different to massively
out of sync. That’s when someone is most
likely to get the wrong end of the communication stick and when we are most
likely to misunderstand and to be misunderstood.

In
our experience, one of the best skills you can learn to improve your communication
is to develop the ability not only to see other points of view but to then
incorporate those points in view in the way you talk or write to other people.

There
are many more skills that will help you become a better communicator, but if
you can start with that one and keep practising it, your communication skills
will improve dramatically.